and here no attempt will be made to deal with any but the admittedly greatest names.  Nothing can be said, for instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and apostleship of Matthew Arnold.  These authors, one and all, interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no means a handbook to serious reading they will be no more mentioned here.

In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this method of exclusion cannot apply.  Both Carlyle and Ruskin were professional men of letters; both in the voluminous compass of their works touched on a large variety of subjects; both wrote highly individual and peculiar styles; and both without being either professional philosophers or professional preachers, were as every good man of letters, whether he denies it or not, is and must be, lay moralists and prophets.  Of the two Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, his original, is apt to be tortured and obscure.  Inside the body of his work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for himself.

As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty when the Queen came to the throne.  Already his years of preparation in Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to be one of the central hearths of literary London.  More than that, he had already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style. Sartor Resartus was written and published serially before the Queen came to the throne; the French Revolution came in the year of her accession at the very time that Carlyle’s lectures were making him a fashionable sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the reviews.  But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a new spirit into his work.  For the first time he applied his peculiar system of ideas to contemporary politics. Chartism appeared in 1839; Past and Present, which does the same thing as Chartism in an artistic form, three years later.  They were followed by one other book—­Latter Day Pamphlets—­addressed particularly to contemporary conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works.  Then came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of his life silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals.